I hope this never happens to you but, if it does………..

Several weeks ago our town’s walk in medical clinic caught fire late at night and was almost completely destroyed. Luckily, no one was in the building and thus no one was hurt as a result. No one that is, except for the medical practice that was housed within the building.

The tenants who lost their offices were able to set up shop in a nearby medical office building within a short period of time. Now for the best part, according to Dr. Arnold Koff the building’s owner and one of the doctors that practiced in the building had this to say:

“We had our medical records in the cloud, so it was marvelous. We had access to all patients’ records without disruption.”

Would you be able to say the same thing about your business data if you came to work one morning to find that your place of business had burned to the ground?

As Dr. Koff said in far fewer words:

One of many benefits to Cloud Computing is the level of security and care that your data is given. The data centers used in Cloud Computing environments go to extreme levels to secure the data that they are responsible for. Steps include (but not limited to):

The buildings used to store your data are substantial structures while being non-descript so as not to look overly inviting to any thieves.

The buildings are secured with complex building entry and exit processes.

The buildings are equipped with fire extinguishing systems that do not rely on liquids to stop a fire (they basically have systems that quickly eliminates all oxygen from the building thus making it impossible for a fire to get going).

The buildings have professional security guards to make sure that only authorized people can gain access to the property.

Data is stored on duplicate disk drives so that if one drive fails you never skip a beat with your data processing. Another drive simply takes over as the primary drive while the failed drive is replaced.

Data is backed up and taken of site for storage. Maybe the building can’t catch fire but a tornado or other natural disaster could hit anywhere. If it does, your system can be back up and running in a matter of hours.

This is not a complete list of the ways that you are protected via Cloud Computing but it should be enough to make a point that your data is far more secure in the Cloud than it likely is within your own place of business.